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It was difficult to view Grube’s amendment as anything other than a clever ploy. The task force had by no means ignored the subject of visible minorities, native people, and the disabled. Its report proposed bringing forward policies for redressing imbalances in those areas within a year as part of a second phase of employment equity, as Ryerson had done. That involved further research. The committee’s mandate, after all, had been to deal with equity for women. They’d done what they’d been asked to do.
Immediately after the meeting, Porteous consulted the college’s lawyer on the meaning of Grube’s amendment. The lawyer, John C. Murray, wrote that “if the purpose of the ‘Equity 2000’ report is to advance the rights of women or other minority groups, this amendment simply will not achieve that result. The amendment would, if any meaning could be given to it at all, simply provide equal rights to every person in society, which is, of course, simply a reflection of the status quo.” He went on to say that the amendment was “essentially meaningless in law” and was therefore “null and void.”
At the November meeting, the original motion (minus the Grube amendment) was again placed before council. Grube complained that the lawyer’s views represented just one man’s opinion. Faculty council member John Newman circulated a document to demonstrate that in his department, fine arts, seventy-one per cent of the painting and drawing faculty would be women in the year 2000 if equity were to proceed. Newman didn’t mention that for years well over eighty per cent of the faculty in fine arts had been men. (And, as Porteous subsequently demonstrated, Newman’s figures were inflated.) Council approved the equity proposals 8-5 with two abstentions. The battle appeared to be over. What we didn’t know was that equity was about to be refought in the media.
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 n January 9, 1990, on the op-ed page of The Globe and Mail appeared an article entitled “No male artists need apply.” Its author was John Grube. According to Grube, “the vast majority of job openings at OCA occur as a result of retirement, and the council has reserved all such openings over the next 10 years for women applicants.” The disabled, native people, and visible minorities, he wrote, “will have to go on sitting at the back of the bus.” Note the loaded language. (There’s nothing that prevents women members of those three groups from applying for equity positions.) “And gay men,” he added, “although supposedly protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code, are totally excluded.” (Huh? Gay men, like straight men, can apply for the more than twenty nonequity periods a year that are open to all applicants.)
As the Globe ’s Bronwyn Drainie subsequently put it, “The first Globe readers knew about the story was a diatribe against the new policy ... by disgruntled OCA faculty member John Grube. That was prominently displayed on page seven ... while the news story explaining the details was buried in the back of the same edition. It is common practice,” she added, “for newspapers to print the news first and the comment afterward.” But the Globe ’s news story hadn’t got it right either. It was entitled “OCA to hire women for next 10 years.” Nowhere did it explain why the programme was needed, or make clear that there were a great many other periods available. The two pieces in the Globe set the tone for much of the media coverage that followed.
On January 11, 1990, a Canadian Press story about what was happening at OCA was carried by dozens of papers across Canada. Its first paragraph stated, “Men need not apply for the 50 teaching positions open at the Ontario College of Art this September — all are to be filled by women.” Only in the fifth paragraph, for those who read that far, was it made clear that men would still be eligible for openings not created by retirement.
On the basis of the news accounts they’d read (and in some cases, what they were being told by disgruntled faculty), misinformed columnists proceeded to denounce the college. Frank Jones of The Toronto Star wrote, “what they’ve got at OCA is not an affirmative action program, it’s a shrewdly engineered feminist coup.” Philosopher Thomas Hurka, who was then writing an ethics column for the Globe , stated in a discussion of affirmative action that “the Ontario College of Art will hire 100 per cent women for the next 10 years.” (I didn’t think philosophers believed everything they read.) David Warren, editorial-page columnist for the Kingston Whig-Standard , described OCA as a place where “a feminist administration has placed a 10-year moratorium on the hiring or promotion of males.” Editorials and letters to the editor attacked the college.
Equity at OCA, continued >
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